Channel 4 Plans World’s First Interactive TV Drama

The youth of today don’t really watch TV. Why should they, when they can play PlayStations, watch DVDs, use the Internet or hang around bus shelters drinking three litres of extra strong cider and vomiting on the seats?

To get kids watching TV again, Channel 4 is planning to make the world’s first interactive TV drama. And Ms Dynamite is going to be in it and everything. Will you be able to interactively make her forehead smaller? Doubtful.

Dubplate Drama, as the new show is called, is so ludicrously
marketed at young people that it must have been thought up by a bunch
of old men who use the word "groovy" a lot - the same people who think
that calling children "Kidz" instead of "Kids" is a good idea. The
story of Dubplate Drama focuses on a young female grime MC who gets involved with drugs
and guns. Because that’s the stuff the kidz like, right?

Apart from the storyline - the TV equivalent of your Dad in a
baseball cap - Channel 4 has big plans for Dubplate Drama. Not only can
you watch it on TV, you can download it to your PSP and your 3G mobile
phone. And it’s interactive! Kind of.

Not interactive like San Andreas, where you have total freedom over
whatever you want to do, but interactive in the sense that at the end
of each episode, the lead character will face a dilemma, and viewers
vote on the outcome. So it’ll be like a Choose Your Own Adventure book,
but you don’t really get to choose anything because every other voter might
want to take the other option.

Although Dubplate Drama is possibly the first interactive TV drama,
there have been experiments in other mediums. A few years ago, BBC
radio ran a show called Wheel Of Fortune; three separate dramas on
Radio 3, Radio 4 and the Internet which listeners could flick between
stations to get a unique story.

And then there was the interactive DVD thriller called Tender Loving
Care (DVDs) where - inbetween story segments - you had to answer personality
questionnaires, pushing the story in different ways depending on the
answers you gave. If you gave one set of answers, one of the female
leads took off her bra, pressed her boobs against a window and jiggled
about a bit.

Now that’s what the kidz want.

Read more:

What happens next? You decide, as Channel 4 launches TV’s first interactive drama - Guardian

[story by Stuart Heritage]